by Ruth Rendell
‘I’d like to stay.’
Mopsa said in a small lost voice, ‘What about me?’
‘I’ll leave you to decide about that,’ said Dr Raeburn. ‘I think you’ll find James will be easier now he’s in the tent.’
The fingers clutching her finger had not slackened. ‘You can have a taxi back, Mother. I’ll come down with you and call you a taxi. You’ll be all right.’
Mopsa’s face had grown soft, putty-like, tremulous. Her lips shook. The bedroom was very dimly lit, a single low-wattage bulb gleaming from a fitting on the wall above the washbasin, and in this gloom the glazed look had come back into her eyes. It was the first time since her arrival that Benet had seen that look.
‘I’m never left on my own. It was bad enough being alone in the plane, I mean, without anyone I know. I can’t be all on my own in a strange house.’
‘It would only be for one night.’
‘Why do you have to stay with him? He’s asleep, he won’t know whether you’re there or not. Parents never used to stay in hospitals with children, it was unheard-of, the staff wouldn’t have put up with it.’
‘Things have changed.’
‘Yes and for the worse. Your father wouldn’t have let me come if he’d known you were going to leave me on my own, Brigitte. I’ll be ill if you leave me on my own.’
Benet carefully disengaged her finger from James’s grasp. He did not move. She was filled with an intense dislike of Mopsa, something that verged on hatred. When her mother was rational like this, though exhibiting all the signs of solipsism – indifference to others’ wishes, deep selfishness – the feeling that all her madness was an act put on to gain attention was inescapable. Of course it wasn’t, it was as real as a physical paralysis. And if it were an act, wasn’t that in itself a sign of madness, that anyone would take an act so far?
I must not hate my mother . . .
‘You’ll be quite safe. There are bars on the ground-floor windows, there’s a phone on each floor. It’s not exactly a rough area, is it?’
‘I’m not going without you, Brigitte. You can’t make me. I can sleep in the chair here. I can sleep on the floor.’
‘They won’t let you,’ Benet said. ‘They’ll only allow parents. Look, I’ll drive you home and then I’ll come back here. I’ll come home again first thing in the morning.’
‘I have to go for my tests first thing in the morning.’
Mopsa’s face was stubborn and set. All the pointed, sharp witch look had come back. Her clouded eyes were fixed not on Benet but on a point in the far corner of the room. Benet looked at James. He was asleep and the vaporizer was gently and steadily puffing steam into the croupette. She picked her coat off the bed. She thought she saw surprise, perhaps a little more than that, in the ward sister’s expression when she said she wouldn’t be staying overnight. Mopsa, who had spent long stretches of her life in hospitals, wasn’t happy here. She darted wary glances from side to side as they walked towards the lift, especially at the sign pointing in the direction of the psychiatric clinic.
The house had a welcoming feel in spite of the crates still waiting to be unpacked. It was warm and bright and comfortable. Yet for Benet the night was almost a sleepless one. She could not rid her mind of the image of James waking up in that steamy hothouse and finding her gone. What use was she to her mother? Mopsa had taken a sleeping pill the moment they got back to the Vale of Peace, had fallen asleep ten minutes later and had been sleeping ever since. Passing her door at six in the morning on her way to make tea, Benet heard Mopsa’s regular breathing with a hint of a snore in it.
She phoned the hospital, spoke to the staff nurse on Edgar Stamford Ward and was told James was much the same. He had passed a restless night. The staff nurse didn’t say if he had called for Benet or cried for her and Benet could not bring herself to ask. She knew he must have done. He had never before been parted from her. If only Mopsa’s tests were being done at the same hospital! Instead she was going to have to drive her miles across the sprawl of north London suburbs and fight her way back again through the traffic before she could go to James. For the first time in her relationship with James, she felt guilt, she felt she had failed him.
Mopsa appeared at eight, dressed in the skirt of the grey suit and a harebell-blue angora jumper with a string of pearls round her neck. This morning she was not so much the sensible housewife as the svelte businesswoman. Even her hair, probably from the position in which it had been pressed into the pillow, looked less uncompromisingly chopped off. Discreet make-up, pinkish and mauvish, lessened the years and the ducking stool image. She didn’t ask about James and Benet didn’t tell her she had phoned the hospital. She was full of the prospect of her tests. Did she look all right? Should she wear her blue raincoat or the jacket of the suit or both?
James might not have existed. Benet felt an actual physical pain at this neglect of him, she couldn’t eat, she was choked with resentment at Mopsa’s attitude and with love for him. She wanted to get hold of Mopsa and shake her and shout into her face, this is my child, this is my son, don’t you realize? It would be useless, it would be cruel and pointless.
I must not hate my mother . . .
Once they were in the car, driving along Hampstead Lane, she found a practical calm voice.
‘I’m going to leave you at the Royal Eastern and go to James. You must either take a taxi back home or to the hospital where James is. It’s quite simple and you’ll be fine. I’ve written down both addresses for you.’
She waited for the storm of protest but none came. Mopsa was in euphoric mood, anxious to please, graciously prepared to be unselfish. Of course she would have a taxi, of course she would be all right. She was sorry she had insisted on Benet’s coming back with her the night before, but things felt different at night, didn’t they? On a bright morning like this one you could hardly believe how bad you had felt at night, how disorientated and alone and afraid.
Benet came back by the same route, the same short cut through back streets, as that by which she had taken Mopsa to the Royal Eastern Hospital in Tottenham. The traffic piled up as she was waiting to turn out of Rudyard Gardens into Lordship Avenue – there were roadworks in progress at the junction – so, taking her place in the slow-moving queue, she was able to look around her at this district where she had once lived.
It was very much changed. The trees in Rudyard Gardens had been pollarded and had become an avenue of beheaded trunks. The rows of houses were no longer inhabited, their doors and windows boarded up with sheets of corrugated metal. Mopsa would have called it a slum. On the far side of Lordship Avenue the sun shone out of a hard blue sky on to the blocks and terraces and single tower of a housing estate called Winterside Down. When she and Mary and Antonia had shared their attic in Winterside Road, the estate had not yet been built. There had only been their road overlooking a stretch of desolate land extending from the gasworks to the canal.
Her car and the three ahead moved slowly up to the junction. A black Dobermann pinscher was strolling over the pedestrian crossing. It reached the Rudyard Gardens side and the traffic began to shift again. Just at this point, Benet remembered, she had used to catch the bus that took her down into the City and the offices of the magazine she had been working for. If it hadn’t been for James, for hurrying to be with James, she would have turned into Winterside Road and parked the car, for just as the traffic began to move she saw someone she knew. Tall, heavily-built, fair, getting on for forty now probably – what was his name? Tom something. Tom Woodhouse. He had had the garage next to the house where their flat was and once or twice she had rented a car from him. Benet wound down the window, called his name and waved but the traffic roar drowned her voice. She watched him in her rearview mirror as he went across the zebra crossing and got into the cab of a parked van.
James wasn’t in the croupette or even in his room but in the children’s playroom chalking on a blackboard. When Benet came in, he didn’t run to her or hold out his arm
s but only smiled a radiant and somehow mysterious smile as if he and she were together in some secret conspiracy. He said to a small girl: ‘That’s my mummy.’
‘We’d like him to have one quiet night in here before he goes home,’ the sister said.
Mopsa arrived at twelve. She looked pleased with herself, almost jaunty. They had done no tests on her at the Royal Eastern, only examined her and questioned her and made a new appointment for three days’ time.
‘I shall risk it on my own in your house tonight.’
‘It would be a great help if you could.’ Benet felt absurdly grateful. ‘It’s very brave of you.’
Suddenly Mopsa had become the sensible no-nonsense woman who stayed by herself in strange houses night after night. ‘I shall take a pill. I shan’t know a thing till morning.’
James ran about playing all day. By six he was asleep, rather pale, breathing heavily, exhausted. One more night and he could go home.
‘I ought to be there now,’ said Mopsa, looking at her watch. ‘I expect your father’s been phoning. I expect he was worried when I wasn’t there.’
‘I’ll come down with you and help you find a taxi.’
‘I thought I might drive your car.’
It was dark. The streets here were narrow and congested. Mopsa had held a driving licence for thirty years but not driven for the past fifteen.
‘I’d rather you practised in daylight first,’ Benet said.
Mopsa argued about it while putting her coat on, she argued about it in the lift, surprisingly giving way without another word when Benet said she had left the car keys up in the room and the spare set at home. The night was black and damp with a smell of gunpowder in the air. Children had been letting fireworks off in advance of Guy Fawkes Day. Mopsa waved from the taxi window, she leaned out and waved as if she were going away for ever.
James’s crying awoke Benet after about three hours. She had been dreaming of Edward, the first time she had dreamed of him for months. She was telling Edward she was going to have a child, his child, and no, she didn’t want an abortion, she wanted the child, and the alternative was not marriage, she didn’t want to marry him or even be with him any more . . . It had been very much like that, things in reality had been very much like that dream. Waking up was a shock because she had thought the dream was real. James was sitting up inside the croupette, crying and sobbing.
Benet picked him up and held him and he stopped crying, though his breathing was rough again. She wondered if this would count against a ‘quiet’ night. The next doctor or nurse to look in would probably ask her and she couldn’t lie to them, for James’s sake she wouldn’t dare. The room was not dark, it was still lit by the single dim wall light. It was very quiet for a hospital, silent but for a distant faint metallic clattering. She started thinking about Mopsa. She was aware that it was a mistake to admit anxieties into her mind at this hour, but, once there, they stuck, they refused to go away. Had she been wrong to let Mopsa go off alone? Suppose she hadn’t been able to find the doorkey? Or once she was in, suppose the lights had fused? Benet was sure her father would never have allowed Mopsa to be alone. And if Mopsa had got into the house safely, had answered the phone and spoken to him, was he too lying sleepless down there in the south of Spain, worrying about his wife, furious with his daughter, thinking of all the things that might happen?
James was sleeping now against her shoulder. She laid him back in the cot inside the tent and put her hand through the opening in the zip so that he could hold it. When the nurse came in at four he was still sleeping and Benet said nothing about the disturbance of two hours before. She went to sleep herself, she had no more dreams. The room was beginning to lighten, a grey dawn showing through the slats of the blinds, when next she woke. A siren had awakened her, and when she knelt up and looked out of the window, she saw an ambulance passing with its blue light on.
As soon as it got to eight Benet thought she would phone the house in the Vale of Peace. It was not yet half-past seven. Mopsa was not a late riser, she was always up and about by eight. Inside the steamy tent James slept, lying on his back, the vaporizer puffing away. They would let her take him home before lunch. Then a week or two for convalescence, and once Mopsa had gone back, there was no reason why the two of them, she and James, should not go away for a holiday. Why not? She could afford it now. She could afford any amount of holidays, or tax-deductible working trips, as her accountant called them.
‘You don’t have holidays any more, Miss Archdale.’
They could go somewhere warm, North Africa, or the Canaries. James wouldn’t get croup there. Her American publishers wanted her to go to California as part of a promotional trip and she could pay a visit to Universal Studios where they had begun shooting The Marriage Knot . . .
James had opened his eyes. He was moving his head from side to side, rubbing his eyes with his fists. The floppy-legged tiger cub lay sprawled on the pillow beside him. Benet ran the drumstick down the painted octave of the xylophone, do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do. Usually that alerted him. He would reach for the stick and want to play the notes himself. She unzipped the tent. He put out his arms and said, ‘Mummy,’ but he didn’t raise his head from the pillow.
Benet lifted him on to her lap. His forehead was hot and he was breathing the way he had done the evening she had brought him in. He very obviously wasn’t over it yet; he was less well than he had been the day before.
‘You’re my poor lamb, aren’t you? It’s giving you a really hard time.’
The nurse came in with a thermometer. Benet left James with her and went down the corridor to the pay phone. The time was just on eight. In the house in the Vale of Peace there was a phone on each floor, you didn’t have to run downstairs or up when the phone rang. Benet dialled her own number, wondering what kind of storm would break when she had told Mopsa that James was going to have to stay in hospital for more days and more nights and she was going to have to stay with him.
The phone started ringing. It rang and rang. Benet put the receiver back and tried again in case she had misdialled. Still there was no answer. It was early yet, it was possible Mopsa was still asleep.
Breakfast had arrived. Cornflakes, a boiled egg and bread and marmalade for herself, milk, baby cereal and an orange for James. James wouldn’t eat. He clung to her, clutching her round the neck while she tried to eat cornflakes. The day sister came in, said she would like him to be in the croupette, would Benet please try and keep him in the croupette, and Dr Raeburn would be along to see him in about an hour.
James pushed the milk away with his arm, spilling it over Benet’s jeans. She got him to lie down inside the tent by inserting the upper half of her own body in with him. The vaporizer puffed away steadily.
‘He’s got a little temperature,’ the nurse said, filling in his chart. ‘It would be good for him to have a little sleep.’
Finally he did sleep and she went back to the phone. She dialled her own number and it started to ring. She was aware of a tight feeling of anxiety beginning to knot inside her. The phone rang ten times, fifteen times. She put the receiver back and she didn’t dial again because there was a woman in a dressing gown with a bandaged leg waiting to use it. Benet recalled how, when she herself had been about thirteen, Mopsa had disappeared without warning and been found two days later wandering in Northampton (in a sleeveless dress) having apparently lost her memory. No one ever found out how she got there or where the dress, which was not one of her own, had come from.
Mopsa might never have gone back to the Vale of Peace last night. As soon as she was out of sight, she might easily have altered the directions to the taxi driver. Benet wondered if she should phone the police, then dismissed the idea as extreme. Later in the day, especially if James got up and played with the other children as he had been doing, she would take the opportunity to rush home for an hour.
Mopsa had seemed so sane, so ordinary, so normal. But perhaps she had always been at her sanest, or appeared to be so,
before a bout of madness. If she hadn’t gone to the Vale of Peace, where would she go? She knew no one in London now except those old neighbours, the Fentons, and very likely they too had moved away by now.
The woman with the bandaged leg finished her call and Benet dialled again. There was no reply. Benet found it impossible to imagine her mother going for a walk or getting a taxi to come here, but how well did she know her mother? What did she know of her except that she was totally unpredictable? Once Mrs Fenton had found her lying in a bath in reddening water, her wrists cut . . .
It took Benet a long time to get hold of a London telephone directory E–K but at last she did and found the Fentons’ number. They were still there at number 55 Harper Lane, or Mrs Fenton was. The number was listed in the name of Mrs Constance Fenton, so perhaps her husband had died in the meantime. Benet dialled her own number again and, when there was no reply, Mrs Fenton’s. A young woman’s voice answered.
‘That was my daughter,’ Constance Fenton said when she came to the phone. ‘I’ve got my daughter and my son-in-law and my grandson staying with me till their house is ready.’ She was a woman who had the rather pleasant habit of talking to you as if the last time you had conversed had been yesterday and not ten years ago.
Benet asked her, warily, tactfully, if by any chance her mother was there.
‘Your mother?’
Then Benet knew at once Mopsa wasn’t there, hadn’t been there. Constance Fenton wanted to know all about Mopsa. Was she in London? When was she coming to visit? What a delightful surprise it was, how much she looked forward to seeing Mopsa!
‘I know she’ll be in touch with you very soon,’ Benet said. She put the phone down. She had begun to feel sick with dread. Mopsa might be anywhere, a danger to herself and others.
3
THE CHINESE BRIDGE spanned the canal from Winterside Road to the path that crossed the green lawns and penetrated the estate. Barry had wondered why they called it Chinese until he had seen one just like it on an old willow-pattern plate round at Iris’s. Winterside Down was a little world that had everything in it you wanted and plenty you didn’t. The streets were all named after people from the Labour Party’s past. There was a square in the middle of it called Bevan Square with a shopping precinct, a sub-post office, a unisex hair stylist, a video centre and a Turkish takeaway. Most of the people were of Greek or Irish or West Indian origin, though there were some Indians too. It was all quite new, the oldest houses only six years old, and it hadn’t yet settled down. They had built one tower block and then apparently decided people didn’t want tower blocks and were frightened of living in them, so that single tower stood out of the middle of Winterside Down like an enormous lighthouse, surrounded by the pygmy houses that people did want to live in.
